Motivational Quotes

Churches

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

- Wilder, Billy

Best Quotes about Churches

He who is near the Church is often far from God.

Proverb, French

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.

Brown, Robert Mcafee

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph

What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.

Hawkins, O. S.

It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.

Austen, Jane

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.

Shedd, Charlie

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.

Chadwick, Henry

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

Pound, Ezra

10.

People have described me as a management bishop but I say to my critics, Jesus was a management expert too.

Carey, George

11.

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

12.

It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.

Penn, William

13.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Swift, Jonathan

14.

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

Nash, L. L.

15.

A little, round, fat, oily man of God.

Thomson, James

16.

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

17.

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

18.

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave--with both ends kicked out.

Havner, Vance

19.

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

Wilder, Billy

20.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

Walker, Alice

21.

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.

Fielding, Henry

22.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

23.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Pound, Ezra

24.

The Christian church is a society of sinners. It is the only society in the world, membership in which is based upon the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership.

Morrison, Charles C.

25.

Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.

O'Casey, Sean

26.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church...is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.

Moody, Dwight L.

29.

If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.

O'Casey, Sean

30.

A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady's voice blurted out loud and clear, Anybody been saved here lately?

31.

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.

Norman, Edward

32.

Though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.

33.

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.

Huxley, Aldous

34.

How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is I will see you in the vestry after service.

Smith, Sydney

35.

The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them.

Ruskin, John

36.

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.

Spong, John

37.

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.

Amis, Kingsley

38.

Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.

Moody, Dwight L.

39.

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

Defoe, Daniel

42.

I think a bishop who doesn't give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.

Thomson, James

43.

It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.

Havner, Vance

44.

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

Allen, Fred A.

45.

The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.

John Paul II

46.

The greatest hindrances to the evangelization of the world are those within the church.

Mott, John R.

47.

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

Voltaire

48.

49.

Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.

Ruskin, John

50.